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Tuesday, August 2, 2016

5 Google Tools for Staff Professional Development

In schools we are always looking for creative ways to offer meaningful professional development to staff. This might mean:

Flexible PD where staff can participate at a time of day or day of the week that works best for them

Interactive PD where staff can communicate with others, share ideas, ask questions, and more

Engaging PD with the use of multimedia to go beyond typical text or slideshows

There are certainly dozens of excellent technology tools to use for delivering professional development, and we should try out a wide variety to discover which ones work best for our staff, content, and goals. Many of the free Google tools can lend themselves to providing flexible, interactive, and engaging PD. In this blog post we will take a brief look at five possible Google tools to use:

Google Hangout

Google Hangouts on Air

Google Classroom

Google Communities

Google Sites

See below for details on each of these tools, ideas for use in delivering professional development, and additional resources to help you learn more.

1) Google Hangouts

Hangouts is Google’s free video conferencing tool. It includes many features:

Connect with up to 25 people at one time (for Google Apps for Education users)

Invite people into the Hangout even if they do not have a Google account

Each person can speak with and be seen by the group through video conferencing

Users can choose to show their desktop, rather than their webcam, to show a website, slideshow, document, or such.

Hangouts can be a great way to run professional development for people who are not able to be in the same location. This can be helpful when staff are spread out over a distance, or at several locations, or for PD sessions that are held outside of the normal school day, such as evenings or weekends. Even though the participants are physically in different locations, they can all see and hear each other, and can communicate as if they were all in the same room.

A Hangout on Air is a special type of Google Hangout that adds some additional features which can be very valuable for professional development. These include:

Live broadcasting for an unlimited number of viewers - Although you can still only have 25 people chatting inside the Hangout, you can now have as many people as you want watching a live stream of the video.

Automatic recording - When the Hangout on Air is done, the video is automatically recorded and saved to your YouTube channel.

Using a Hangout on Air for PD is a great way to connect with more people than can participate in a normal Hangout. This is an easy way to record your PD sessions, so other staff members can watch the video later at a date and time that is convenient for them. They also have the benefit of being able to pause and replay portions of the video as needed to move through the material at their own pace (for more details on YouTube shortcuts to improve your viewing options see this blog post).

Note: To run a Hangout on Air, you do need to activate Google+ for your account. Google+ can be accessed and enabled as needed at: https://plus.google.com

Google Classroom lets teachers create a private site for them and their students where they can create assignments, hold discussions, share resources, and more. A lot of times when we think of Google Classroom, we think about using it with our students. However, it can be a great option for teachers as well, since they are students themselves when participating in professional development. Schools can use Classroom for PD sessions, study groups, book studies, and more. Some options for using Classroom for PD include:

The stream or the “About” page can be used to post resources, links, videos, and other instructional material.

The stream can be used to post discussion questions which the teachers can respond to, and can respond to each other as well.

Assignments can be posted for specific tasks the teachers need to complete and submit.

A final Google tool to consider for staff PD is Google Sites. This tool has many useful features:

Free and easy website creation

Ability to insert and embed text, images, links, videos, Google Docs, Google Forms, and much more

Privacy options to control who can access each part of the site

With Google Sites you can create web pages for specific PD topics, or create a multi-page website for an entire PD course. Teachers could access the content directly on the Google Site, or you could embed the webpages in another tool such as your school’s learning management system (LMS). Using Google Sites in combination with your LMS has several benefits:

Certainly there are many other Google tools and non-Google tools that can be used for professional development. However, these tools (Hangouts, Classroom, Communities, and Sites) all provide useful tools and features that can help make PD more flexible, interactive, and engaging. If you have used any of these tools, or have others you recommend for delivering PD, please share your ideas in the comments below.

24 comments:

I recently tried to access Hangouts on Air to start creating videos and posting them for my students. But I noticed that they are doing away with HOA and moving all of it to YouTube soon. If I'm running GAFE from a Chromebook, what video encoder would you recommend for use on a CB?

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